And BTW: USB flash drives are notoriously failure-prone. A very poor backup
medium. You might say "It hasn't happened to me!" Well, it hasn't
happened to
me either. But my children toss them every few months. They're almost as
fragile as floppies, and easily fried too
Thanks for the heads up about that. I use them mainly for transporting
files. My backup is an external hard drive.
Another thing: if you think that, by thoroughly backing up your data to an
image or to another machine, you'll be able to reinstall a Windows operating
system on a replacement drive or another machine, think again. It won't work
Huh?! That's why I used Powerquest's Drive Image.
-- not unless the drive geometry is identical (same exact hardware).
No, not even close.
What you
_can_ do is a barebones reinstall of the OpSys, and then overwrite everything
with your old data,
But could I boot from the drive image, if the laptop's internal drive dies?
Probably not, huh? Probably, it can't recognize a firewire drive anyway in
such a case. How does one recover from a dead, soldered in, drive? The CD
supplied with the laptop? Oh, I see you say just that below:
An important implication is that you need a physical CD to do any reinstall --
not these stupid hidden restore partitions on your original drive that the
manufacturers are pawning off! What good is that if your original drive
fails?
Now is the time to contact your manufacturer to request a CD. I think most of
them will oblige; IBM does.
HP provided a couple of CDs of that sort with the new laptop. Some time ago
I put them away in a special place for safekeeping--so naturally I can no
longer find them. But my wife is the Locator of Lost Objects.
Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx